The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

Concerned About Unconventional Mental Health Interventions?

Friday, February 6, 2015

An Observable Problem for Adopted Children, and Why We Need Not Look for a "Primal Wound"

Periodically, I receive complaints and vituperation
from readers who insist that any emotional discomfort they feel as adoptees is
evidence for a “primal wound”-- damage posited
by authors like Nancy Verrier to result from the breaking of a prenatal
emotional attachment when an infant is separated from the birth mother. I’ve
pointed out repeatedly that there is no evidence that attachment of baby to
mother occurs prenatally, although obviously many, even most, women develop
preoccupation with and love for their baby during the course of the pregnancy.
There are plenty of factors other than a “primal wound” that could account for
the distress reported by some adoptees when they reach adulthood.

As a general rule of critical thinking, it’s better
not to assume that there exist more factors than are needed to account for an
event. This is a rule often called the law of parsimony, or “Ockham’s razor”.
This rule does not say that there could never be any causal factors other than
the ones you know about-- just that it’s
wiser not to think that there are unless you have really good evidence to
support the idea. That’s why I follow an old tradition of scientific thought in
saying that if there’s no evidence for a “primal wound” except that some
adoptees feel distressed, and there are other factors that appear to cause that
distress, the best decision is to reject the idea of the “primal wound”.

The decision that’s made about the “primal wound”
idea is one that has many practical implications. One is that if the PW exists
as an insurmountable problem, there is no point considering other issues about
adoption, fostering, and the way children are cared for or transitioned between
caregivers. Accepting the PW idea means that there should be no adoption except
in cases where all of a baby’s relatives are dead or incapable of care. Yet it’s
clear that there are many cases where birthmothers and others are very much
alive, but have social, emotional, or medical reasons for choosing not to care
for a child. There are also many cases where birthmothers or relatives want to
care for a child but are not safe people for the child to be with. Although
there are strong arguments against allowing adoptions to be “brokered” by
people whose agendas push for separation of parents and children (see Kathryn
Joyce’s Child Catchers), either
adoption or institutional care continues to be needed for numbers of children
across the world, and we continue to need to know more about how best to handle
this situation.

A recent article in the journal Adoption & Fostering is very relevant to that need (Boswell, S.,
& Cudmore, L. (2014). “The children were fine”: Acknowledging complex
feelings in the move from foster care into adoption. A & F, 38, 5-21). The authors, two British child
psychotherapists in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, focused on what happens as children who have
been fostered move into adoptive homes. Boswell and Cudmore point out that “Adoption
involves huge long-term gains for children, but leaving the care of their
previous home will also involve a major loss”--
the loss of a foster parent, who may be the only caregiver a young child
can remember, and who is very likely to be the only stable caregiver he or she
has known.

Boswell and Cudmore noted that “In order for
children to feel safe enough to settle into their new family and start the
process of forming a trusting relationship with their adoptive parents, they
will need adults around them who recognize that they are experiencing a major
loss [the loss of the foster parent—JM], and who are able to support them
emotionally by remaining attuned to what this loss means for them. This
involves holding in mind the loss of a meaningful relationship while doing
everything they can to nurture a new one.”

Boswell and Cudmore stressed the lack of research or
other sources of guidance on how these transitions were best made. Looking at current practice in Britain, they
found that “children are usually moved within seven to 14 days of meeting their
new parents and once moved, generally do
not see their foster carer again for at least three months, often longer, and
some not at all. Younger children and babies tend to be moved more quickly.”
Some agencies stated that a child’s strong attachment to the foster parent was
a reason to avoid contact, not to encourage it.

Part of Boswell and Cudworth’s research focused on
the attitudes and expectations of foster parents as they prepare to let an
infant or toddler whom they experience as “theirs” go to an adoptive family. “Although
a great deal of attention was paid to the continuity of routine—food, toys, smells,
bedtime arrangements, life story books—it seemed much harder for the adults to
remain fully in touch with the children’s emotional state and the fact that
they would be losing a very significant
relationship.” Foster parents were told, and told themselves, that they must
keep a professional perspective and not allow their own feelings to dominate.
This was “to protect adoptive parents from being burdened with the child’s
attachment and impending loss… [The adoptive parents] already in a state of
high anxiety, … felt they could not have coped with the foster carer bombarding
them with her own feelings of loss, or with the level of attachment between
herself and the child”.

According to Boswell and Cudworth, deep emotions
about the transition from the foster to the adoptive homes were usually seen as
belonging to the adults, not to the children, who were generally considered as “fine”.
This was taken as a reason not to encourage early contact with the foster
parent-- “the prospect of a premature
contact with the carer raised fears of an uncontained outpouring of distress,
images of a clinging, sobbing child... there seemed to be a shared belief among
adopters, foster carers, and social workers that old attachments needed to be
broken and forgotten about before new ones could be made, leaving any
underlying grief to subside as quickly and as quietly as possible.”

This report about adoptive transitions in Britain
jibes with events in the United States, where adoption caseworkers may also feel
that their object is to break whatever connection has been made with the foster
parent in order to facilitate a new attachment, and where one occasionally
hears of such things as a caseworker picking up a sleeping one-year-old from
the foster home and placing her still asleep in bed at the adoptive home, to
awaken later completely bewildered.

As Boswell and Cudworth point out, and as Mary
Dozier has also shown, both theory and research emphasize that gradual
transitions in care are best for young children and for their caregivers. In
fact, an old attachment does not have to be “broken” through abrupt separation
in order for new attachments to occur; that old idea seems to have hung on from
the days when John Bowlby posited monotropy of attachment, with a single
attachment figure. We know now that attachments to several adults and perhaps
some children are normal parts of young children’s emotional development, and
one attachment does not have to be wrenched away in order for others to thrive.
Considering the course of human evolutionary development, it’s difficult to see
how else things could be.

When transitions to adoption are abrupt, young
children have experiences with foster parents who withdraw from the
relationship out of their own adult grief and the fear that they will be unprofessional,
as well as with adoptive parents who can’t bear to face what the newly-resident
child might actually be feeling. Neither set of adults can possibly offer the
emotional support the young child needs in the face of overwhelming change,
These are just facts of life, not ways of blaming either foster or adoptive
parents. In order to help the parents help the child, we need to provide them
with serious professional support--
which can be brought to bear only when everyone in the picture has a
better understanding of the realities of attachment. That hasn’t happened yet.

Hmmm lost my previous comment I think. Anyway, I will try again. Thank you Jean for continuing to raise an eyebrow at the damned Primal Wound Theory. It provides a detrimental excuse for adoptive parents so that they need not look at what they may be doing wrong as parents to cause their children to struggle. They can instead simply chalk it up to their child being irreparably damaged by virtue of being adopted. I think the theory was designed to absolve adoptive parents of any responsibility for adopted persons' unhappiness.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.